On which I write about the books I read, science, science fiction, fantasy, and anything else that I want to. Currently trying to read and comment upon every novel that has won the Hugo and International Fantasy awards.

Monday, December 31, 1984

Comments: One side effect of award lists is placing stories into context by lining them up with other, contemporaneous;y published stories. And sometimes, in comparison, stories don't seem to hold up all that well. As an example, I would contrast David Brin's Startide Rising, this year's Best Science Fiction novel winner with Norman Spinrad's The Void Captain's Tale, which appears in the same category a few places down the list. Startide Rising is pretty much eactly what I would expect of mid-1980s science fiction - a dynamic story of a discovery by the human and dolphin crew of the starship Streaker and the galactic upheaval that ensues. The Void Captain's Tale, on the other hand, seems like a novel from the early 1970s, replete with sexual politics that seem drawn directly from the 1960s. That these two novels were published in the same year seems almost impossible, and yet there they are.

Other Nominees:
2. The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov
3. Millennium by John Varley
4. Helliconia Summer by Brian W. Aldiss
5. The Void Captain's Tale by Norman Spinrad
6. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
7. Thendara House by Marion Zimmer Bradley
8. Against Infinity by Gregory Benford
9. Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson
10. The Nonborn King by Julian May
11. Superluminal by Vonda N. McIntyre
12. Welcome, Chaos by Kate Wilhelm
13. The Crucible of Time by John Brunner
14. Worlds Apart by Joe Haldeman
15. Valentine Pontifex by Robert Silverberg
16. Gods of Riverworld by Philip José Farmer
17. The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe
18. Forty Thousand in Gehenna by C.J. Cherryh
19. A Matter for Men by David Gerrold
20. The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica by John Calvin Batchelor
21. Wall Around a Star by Jack Williamson and Frederik Pohl
22. Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle
23. Broken Symmetries by Paul Preuss
24. Roderick at Random by John Sladek
25. There Is No Darkness by Joe Haldeman and Jack C. Haldeman II
26. Code of the Lifemaker by James P. Hogan
27. Tik-Tok by John Sladek
28. Transformer by M.A. Foster

Other Nominees:
2. The Blackcollar by Timothy Zahn
3. A Rumor of Angels by M. Bradley Kellogg
4. King's Blood Four by Sheri S. Tepper
5. Starrigger by John DeChancie
6. The Shadow of the Ship by Robert W. Franson
7. Harpy's Flight by Megan Lindholm
8. Anvil of the Heart by Bruce T. Holmes
9. The Forest of App by Gloria Rand Dank
10. Ratha's Creature by Clare Bell

3. Seeking by David R. Palmer
4. Homefaring by Robert Silverberg
5. Hardfought by Greg Bear
6. Hurricane Claude by Hilbert Schenck
7. The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis by Michael Bishop
8. The Lord of the Skies by Frederik Pohl
9. The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars by Fritz Leiber
10. In the Face of My Enemy by Joseph H. Delaney
11. Gilpin's Space by Reginald Bretnor
12. Aquila Meets Bigfoot by Somtow Sucharitkul
13. Eszterhazy and the Autogóndola-Invention by Avram Davidson

Other Nominees:
2. Black Air by Kim Stanley Robinson
3. Slow Birds by Ian Watson
4. Blood Music by Greg Bear
5. Street Meat by Norman Spinrad
6. The Sidon in the Mirror by Connie Willis
7. Multiples by Robert Silverberg
8. (tie) The Black Current by Ian Watson
(tie) The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost by Russell Kirk
10. The Final Report on the Lifeline Experiment by Timothy Zahn
11. The Monkey's Bride by Michael Bishop
12. The Mind of Medea by Kate Wilhelm
13. Blind Shemmy by Jack Dann
14. And the Marlin Spoke by Michael Bishop
15. Remembering Siri by Dan Simmons
16. Cicada Queen by Bruce Sterling
17. Into Whose Hands by Karl Edward Wagner
18. Belling Martha by Leigh Kennedy
19. Red Star, Winter Orbit by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson
20. (tie) In Whose Name Do We Seek the Quark? by Thomas Dulski
(tie) Nunc Dimittis by Tanith Lee
(tie) A Simple Case of Suicide by Marc Stiegler
23. The Hills Behind Hollywood High by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis
24. Deep Song by Reginald Bretnor
25. Life on the Tether by Mark Wheeler
26. A Day in the Life of Justin Argento Morrell by Greg Frost

Other Nominees:
2. Red as Blood by Tanith Lee
3. The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke
4. The Wind From a Burning Woman by Greg Bear
5. The Zanzibar Cat by Joanna Russ
6. Hoka! by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson
7. The 57th Franz Kafka by Rudy Rucker
8. (tie) Midas World by Frederik Pohl
(tie) The Saint-Germain Chronicles by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
10. The Worlds of H. Beam Piper by H. Beam Piper, edited by John F. Carr
11. Sector General by James White
12. The Winds of Change and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov
13. Time Patrolman by Poul Anderson
14. Ringing Changes by R.A. Lafferty
15. Golden Gate and Other Stories by R.A. Lafferty
16. Fire from the Wine-Dark Sea by Somtow Sucharitkul

Location: Campbell Conference Awards Banquet at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas.

Comments: In 1984, the Campbell Award judges rectified their previous error by handing the Best Novel award to Gene Wolfe's Citadel of the Autarch, the stellar concluding volume of the magnificent Urth of the New Sun series. It seems almost criminal that the Campbell Award judges gave so little attention to the previous books in the series, with only Shadow of the Torturer getting any recognition at all, but at least they recognized the quality of Wolfe's achievement in the end.

Comments: In 1984 Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 was honored by the Libertarian Futurist Society as a Hall of Fame selection for the Prometheus Awards. This seems to me to highlight one of the inherent tensions contained in the Prometheus Awards. Bradbury's novel is thought by many to express an anti-censorship theme (although Bradbury seems to have had different ideas), which is more or less in line with libertarian thought, but it is by no means a view that is exclusive to libertarians, and is held by large numbers of people who are not only not friendly to libertarians, they are actively hostile to them. But in order to have worthwhile honorees, the Prometheus Awards have to cast their net so broadly that they catch not only works of libertarian fiction, but works that are so tangentially related to libertarian fiction that the paucity of high quality work in the subgenre is revealed.

Comments: Although the Mythopoeic Society had an established track record of refusing to list the non-winning nominees for the Scholarship Award, they had always listed all of the non-winning nominees in the Fantasy Literature category. In 1984, for no particularly apparent reason, the Society opted not to supply outsiders with a list of also-ran nominees and only revealed the winning entry - Joy Chant's When Voiha Wakes. As has so often been the case when these sorts of curve balls are thrown in genre awards, I have no idea why the Mythopoeic Society chose to do this, and I suspect that I never will.

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